Black Sheep: Ii. The Mail From the New Clearing
LOLODORF, KAMERUN, WEST AFRICA, October 2.
LOLODORF STATION is to move four miles to the west; this will bring us nearer home, but there are other primary objects to be served by the move. The present site is unwholesome and too small. It is impossible either to feed or to employ our schoolboys on our limited ground.
We have bought, two hundred and fifty acres of land, comprising three villages, some gardens, and a tract of forest. The villages show a handful of huts, the gardens are clusters of plantains shaking out their banners in little clearings, but we own a world of forest.
On Saturday of last week the headmen came to be paid. They had served us to all sorts of African dalliance, and we thought that the payment, in trade goods, was to be of a piece with the bargaining; but not so. When the three headmen arrived, followed by their henchmen and women, they played an unexpected part. In less than an hour, and with no more palaver than you might hear over the purchase of a basket of food, they were paid.
We think that they were dazed by their opportunity, as small boys might be who were invited — Oh, I know how fantastic my simile! — to eat their way out of a candy shop. Certainly they had a tranced air. When I came out to see the play, thinking it to have just begun, they were making ready to leave in a kind of cautious silence, — a comparative silence, be it understood, — and in very much the spirit of a missionary who is dreaming of home, and fears to wake.
The headmen were in full dress. Two wore hats that were uncommonly grand, still being cased in those cylinders of pasteboard in which they had been packed; two wore green broadcloth coats, by the epaulets the uniform of some regiment and not originally intended for our friends, one of whom was too small for his coat, the other not small enough. They listened abstractedly to Dr. Lehman’s caution that they were not to buy rum with their gains. They were in a hurry to be off, and presently they started, they and their wives and their friends, all laden with their goods. As a spectacle it was imposing, and of a kind to draw a head out of the door of every hut by the way. There were nests of zinc buckets, of iron pots, piles of hats, — perfect towers of hats, — sheaves of umbrellas and of cutlasses; there were tin trunks of a splendor unknown to you provincials but familiar to us of the West Coast, — very gay, preferably green with a lavish belt of red and no scrimping of gilt. In the trunks were yards and yards of trade cloth, bars of soap, pocket knives, padlocks, matches, and many other cherishable articles that will change hands in numberless marriage palavers. With some such glitter of spoil must Tamerlane have returned from conquest.
Sometimes of a Friday I go to a town twelve miles from here. Half the way is by open road and the last happy half through the forest. It is lovely to go to Ipose; they do so much want a Minisi there. I am espied climbing the hill afar off, for this cluster of villages lies in a beautiful hill country. They rejoice at my coming. An ivory horn announces me, quite as Elsa is announced in the first act of Lohengrin. The hut where I put up is opened, and before I can make a cup of tea there are delegations from the country all about.
This will be four o’clock in the afternoon. At five we have a service, and again at half-past seven the next morning. There will be an audience of say fifty people, minded to know of the high things of God. Every other week Benzhuli, the young elder, preaches to the people of Ipose; they say that his audiences are very large.
A year ago Africa as a spectacle was tremendously interesting: I saw continually the forests and the rivers, the interminable, melancholy file of carriers, the curiously tempered light, the curiously modified color. But more and more a missionary comes to have to do with individuals. His labor and his problems are with these. Mr. Nevinson, in the August Harper’s, very truly says that the African is not known to the white man. He is not. I have hardly a fixed conviction or an inference as fruit of this year’s observation, but the missionary comes to feel that the African is known to God. He feels himself to be, he knows himself to be, one in an affair of three, and God is the third. And he knows himself to be necessary to that union. He is the friend of the Bridegroom.
LOLODORF, KAMERUN, December 3.
We have been down at our new site nearly a month, and begin of late to develop windows and doors, just as we begin to realize that these are effete luxuries. We live in tenement fashion, all in one house; but this is the result of necessity, not of a perverted taste, and we mean — as I suppose all tenement dwellers do — to reform when our circumstances improve. We are all very polite to one another, and that is a great help.
This is Saturday morning, when the schoolteacher does her odd jobs. To escape the sound of other odd jobs I have come down to the schoolhouse, which should be, on this day of the seven, neither schoolhouse nor church, but just a roof over a clearing in the forest.
From the dwelling-house to the schoolhouse is some eight, hundred feet, and this is about the diameter of our present clearing. The forest stands charmed about this breach. Here the fallen trees measure their amazing barren stretch of fallen trunk, and the scant and withering crown of foliage that makes so small a display on the ground. Everywhere the logs burn. In these gray days of the rainy season the clearing is filled with a perpetual thin blue smoke. Here and there among the débris of the forest appears the corn in ragged companies of invasion, — the advance guard of that old army that served the Pilgrim Fathers. Everywhere in the incomplete clearing is activity: men rolling logs and chanting as they labor; men in single file carrying on their shoulders the house-posts and the long straight length of a rooftree; chanting as they come, men bringing in rolls of the yellow bark which serves us for walls and which they spread out to dry, a bright pool of color under the sky; companies of lads coming in at noon and at evening with loads of broad leaves, and singing the song of the roof-thatch.
From this island cast up, you would say, by the sea of forest and seized upon by man, the earth under its cover of green falls away. To the north between the thinning trees we see the blue of ranging hills, to the south we see a hill. There are hills, I am told, all about us, which will presently appear. Through our property, and a few hundred yards from our door, runs the government road to the interior.
Here in the schoolhouse where it was to have been quiet Mr. Hummel is making benches with desk attachments. He is most complacent about this furniture, which is indeed very grand. Here too are fires lit to dry out our mud floor. Of a week day there will be two hundred pupils, men, women, and children, under this roof. When you consider that we could not at the old station, with the best will in the world, accommodate more than fifty boarders and that we could not, under the most inventive system imaginable, provide on our twelve acres work to pay for the food of this number, you will realize how truly a new era has opened for us.
We do not yet have the boys properly housed; they sleep like forest creatures where they find shelter. Indeed they have in the mass, at work in the open, a uniform forest aspect. But under the school-roof, ranged on their rows of logs and to the eyes of their teachers, what thrilling individual differentiations! There is a little boy whom I shall remember always as he stood in line for registration, though he will, it is to be hoped, make some more brilliant showing in the future. He was a very small boy, with a fixed expression of panic and rather more than the average allotment of clothing. When his turn came, he was asked his name, but he could not bring his mouth to answer.
‘Have you paid your tuition?’ asked Mr. Hummel, — for this was a day scholar who must pay the equivalent of one mark for the term of ten weeks.
Still not a ripple of response on that little frozen face; only a flicker of fear in the eyes.
‘If you have not paid you must go to your town and find something, some food or a cutlass, something you must find.’
Still no answer.
‘Move on,’ said Mr. Hummel.
Then, coming to life, the little boy thrust his hand into the bosom of his upper garment, and brought out from where it had lodged over his stomach a little fat-bodied bottle of green fluid, — lavender water by superscription, and doubtless very potent to anoint the person. He was enrolled, and it doth not yet appear what he shall be.
Sometimes little boys go far in a short time. Yesterday, in that half hour before school opens and when the advanced pupils gather to study, I took note of a little boy who sat on the front bench of the senior division. He is, I suppose, eleven years old, an eager little chap, very careless and heedless, but clever, and quite able to teach the beginners in German. Mr. Hummel has put him in charge of the first German chart. Now as he sat dangling his feet, he covered his eyes with his mottled German primer and was still. I knew that he was praying about his lessons and his chart class and all his little difficult concerns.
Presently school begins. Mr. Hummel reads, and asks a Bulu boy to pray, which he does standing, calling down blessings in his sweet staccato voice on ‘Mamma Foot and Miss Hummel and Mr. Matchenda.’ Then these three worthies, girded for the task and doubtless blessed in spite of certain indiscretions of address, set about clearing the forest of the African mind.
You can’t think how sweet the women of this country are. We have just come out from a nine weeks’ quarantine from smallpox, and in all those weeks I had no other occupation than to go about in the villages and acquire affable Ngumba manners. The time was happy for me because the women began to love me, to be very sweet and maternal toward me. It is beautiful to see their gentle ways with me, whom they take, in spite of every protestation, to be a little girl. They think that I am ashamed of my extreme youth and they have a little sly smiling way of agreeing to any age I may suggest. They begin now to tell me of their poor struggles to be good; their Waterloo is inevitably the seventh commandment. They are very pitiful about this. The more one cares for them, — and you must see that one comes to care very much, — the more one is grateful to Christ that He saw such things in the flesh.
LOLODORF, February 19.
I live in such a continual clamor, my dears. I make it my business not to mind the noise, except when it comes from the girls’ quarters, when everybody objects to it. But it does make some sort of impression, as I discovered to-day. I went to hold a meeting in a village upon the crown of a hill, and when I got there the cupboard was bare, — all the inhabitants had gone into the bush to escape the soldiers, who are after carriers. Up and down the street I walked, peering into the empty houses. Only three women were to be found, and as few schoolboys. We went into the little palaver house on the brink of the hill. We sang a few songs, and then I asked, did any one have a question which he would like to ask, — for of course I can answer any question that can be evolved. So I sat still while they thought, and they sat still too, embarrassed by their unusual occupation. Then, my dear, into that little palaver house, open every way to the afternoon, there flowed the quiet of the deserted town, of the green forest, of the blue hills, — the kind quiet of the unpopulated earth. I could have wept for gratitude. This may seem a little thing to you, just as leisure may seem a mild form of excitement, but it was as good as gold or spring water to me.
Many things are changing here. There is, first, the road, very unlike the road as I first knew it, and now the government hill. For days the long cry of a live tree as it falls, until now the hill is as bare as your hand. Almost no bush towns are left, for all have been called out to build upon the road, so there is an end of afternoons in the little ways of the forest. Soon the telephone will be established between here and Kribi — then, automobiles. This is bad, as the fish thinks when he is pulled out of the essential element. But there are always the people, living their mysterious lives under one’s eye. There is life with its unstaled, infinite variety. Courtesy is a wonderful screen, is n’t it? These people sit continually behind it. There is hardly a town within a mile but I have a friend there, who is glad of my coming; ready to lie to me, of course, and afraid of me, but glad and friendly. The names they call me, my dears, because I don’t allow them to call me Mamma, which is the common form of address — Matchenzie, Tchensie, and Mr. Matchenzie!
LOLODORF, February 22.
There was a dwarf in my girls’ school for a few days, and for all she was no more than forty-eight inches high, she was a woman. All morning she sat learning her letters and making little marks on her slate, which she thought was writing. And in the afternoon she worked with the little girls to earn her food. She was just about as big as the rest of them, but she could do more work, — cut more firewood and mow more grass. Because she is a dwarf they think in her town that she must work harder than anybody else. That is the way they think about dwarfs. Her husband bought her long ago from her people, in the close leafy places of the forest, where her mother still lives, — a little, little old woman, I suppose, with a bit of a cloth about her middle, always cooking food in a kettle over a fire on the floor of her leaf shelter. Well, now here was her bit of a daughter learning her letters like any other lucky African, and learning other things besides. She was learning about God, which was a good deal. At least we could hope that if she were to stay a year, she would be quite another sort of a little dwarf. But to-day one of her husband’s other wives came to take her away and she had to go. I put a needle through a card and wrapped some thread around it; then I gave her an aluminum thimble; and she was so pleased with so many possessions of so many kinds that she was not too sad when she went away. But I was.
LOLODORF, April 1.
The other day I was sitting in a hut on a bed, my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands. A woman lay on the bed behind me; she was sick because her husband had beaten her. Suddenly she sat up and began to feel up and down my back with her hand, making out to her satisfaction that my anatomy resembled her own; dear knows how long she had wondered, and all her townspeople too. Presently I felt her hand on my head — stroking my hair, which I wear now tied at my neck, that the little bunch of it and the ribbon may cover the nape from the sun. Then said she, in a voice very tender and caressing, ‘Why won’t you wear your hair as we do?’ ‘Because I should have to cut some of it off.’ ‘ And why do you hate to do that?’ — still stroking my head. ‘Because my father would ask, “What did they do to my child in the country beyond the sea — that they cut off her hair ? ” ’ She laughed at this.
But I was touched by this wish of hers that I should be like herself, and I knew by the feel of her hand on my head that she loved me. All the time ol late I am hunting a way to tell you that things have changed for me, in a kind and degree which matter a great deal, but which cannot be handed out in order. I have at last, in measure, the passion of what I am doing. I never expected this. I feel like the mother of all these poor women.
April 7.
To-day I was in Manjuer Bian’s house. Manjuer is a little woman, a Christian, who dresses like a man,— wears a man’s jacket on dress occasions, — and who is comfortably rank of the soil. Often I meet her coming from her garden, her basket on her back full of roots and herbs, herself like some little brown root dug out of the ground. All her fingers are worn down; one forefinger is quite gone. This is not repulsive as it sounds, only perplexing sometimes when I am in duty bound—in following a narrative of her recounting — to call off the number indicated by her fingers. ‘I have borne children — ugh! ’ says Manjuer Bian, holding up some fingers; and I must of course call the number, and not waste time either. The question is whether or not to count in the missing forefinger. You know how one wonders about a cross-eyed person,—as to whether one is addressed or another. Well, I was in her house to-day and there were other people, — the old blind woman and a headman (in a small way) who has lost one eye, but who looked at me with humor and kindness out of the other.
‘Is it a real word,’ said he, ‘that you are unmarried?’ ‘A real word,’said I. Whereat he laughed — irrepressibly and indulgently. ‘I can arrange a marriage for you,’ said he. ‘That’s exactly where you are mistaken,’ said I; ‘you cannot!’
‘Don’t bother the child,’said Manjuer Bian, who was securing her cloth about her waist and did not look up; more said she in Ngumba, of which I understood the word ’little.'
‘She says,’ said the headman, when I asked him, ‘that you are just a little girl.'
‘Manjuer Bian,’ said I seriously, ‘don’t you know that I am a real woman, as old as Mamma Lehman ? I am grown a long time, Manjuer Bian! ’
Manjuer smiled very kindly, very discreetly; she sat on a little stool and fell to grinding seed on a large flat stone, her legs spread out on either side. Presently she looked up, still smiling. ‘ Yes, Matchenda, of course you are a grown woman!’ said she, exactly as one answers a little girl.
April 12.
I wish you might just once see a caravan of young girls — Bene or Yaunde. You never saw the poignant charm of youth more perfectly expressed. I suppose that pang which is associated with our appreciation of the charm of youth — and which is not all pleasure — is a sort of nostalgia. And then, one has, about little carrier girls, other pangs of a more obvious nature. They are so timid, such pitiful little timidities. Yesterday I passed one who had turned aside to give me way. I stopped very close to her and said something friendly; but at my stopping and at sound of my voice she froze into a perfectly immobile terror; not a muscle moved under her smooth skin; she did not so much as wink; all her bones melted within her, I suppose; and like a little forest creature that has no apparatus of defense, she trusted desperately and without reason to passivity. I have seen this extreme terror before and no compassion avails with it. So I did the only kind thing, which was to pass on. There was another little girl in the caravan. I walked a while behind her, and it was sweet to see that little buoyant body tread the earth. Her little bustle of leaves was fresh and green, gathered from a sweet-scented plant; it beat about her pretty thighs as she walked. Presently she turned her little merry face, and I made some kind of sign that I was an amiable, quite human person; at which she laughed and exclaimed in her adorable treble — chattering to her friends ahead — that the white woman had done thus and so. This caravan came from no very great distance with roof-mats for the governor; they were, I judged, all the available people from one neighborhood, and they had more than commonly the innocent aspect of country folk.
April 26.
I certainly must tell you that several new members have been admitted to the Nsamba — which is the class of instruction preparatory to church membership. Only earnest Christians are taken on this list. There were some fine lads, some men, Vunga (Benzhuli’s wife), and some other women. The Nsamba must have thirty members now. Well, it is awfully hard for the old Ngumba women to learn the Commandments in Bulu, but that is a condition of membership and it is pitiful and funny to hear their examination. One old woman, Mpashima, fixed Mr. Fraser with a most earnest gaze and said, ‘Thou shalt not kill another’s — woman!’ About then I wished I had as big a hat to cover my mouth as Motefi held over his face — he spent most of this hour behind his hat and I was glad he had it.
It was fine to hear Nzonbui rehearse without a break and with calm intelligence. Poor, sweet little Vunga nearly fainted, though she knew them perfectly. You should have seen her when they stood in a row to agree to certain doctrines before admittance. One of these reads, ‘Do you acknowledge that God made man and woman equal?’ Very slowly went up the young Vunga’s arm, and her eyes sought her husband, who sat behind her, with the prettiest air of deprecation. She certainly is a charmer. I was called in consultation when she had a misunderstanding with Benzhuli once. ‘Don’t let yourselves get angry with Benzhuli about your garden work,’ said I sagely, ‘for you know that he is very ignorant.’ ‘Ignorant!’ says Vunga, in a passionate, scornful calm, ‘very ignorant he certainly is!’
LOLODORF, July 3.
On Sunday Bekalli preached. It was great. The house was packed, which it has not been since our coming down here. Little boys hung about the platform and sat upon the ground. Manjuer Bian sat upon a chromo of the Kaiser which was waiting to be hung; she broke the glass and we led her gently off. Everywhere there was a pleasant happy stir.
Bekalli is a little man; he wears a white singlet and a dark cloth with a red border. I noticed when he stood up that he was immaculate. He stood for half a minute with his customary expression of quiet happiness; suddenly he smiled —and then he went off like a sky rocket. The house hummed in answer to him, and his images passed in procession. I am sure that I could n’t tell you what it was all about, — he spoke in Ngumba, — but he held me for thirty minutes. Scotch blood is so tyrannical; I thought — poor Scotch spinster thing — that I was his mother, the mother of the dear little minister. And I had this very same obsession on a gray Sunday three weeks ago, when Ngoi, long and dark in his overalls, preached to a rainy-day audience, his teeth clenched on his natural shyness and his poor sermon balking all the way.
July 27.
On Monday I went to Ipose. I took a hammock for as much of the way as was open road; in the forest I walked. It rained, and where the path ran through clear growths of cane or high grasses I enjoyed all the benefits of a box shower. I rather thought I would go to bed and so escape rheumatism and other ills. The people of Ipose, seeing me while I was yet afar off, blew the horn which calls to service and summons the people from their gardens and the neighboring villages. The costume of the preacher deserves to be described in detail: a dry dress over a night-dress, stockings made of a blue polka-dot handkerchief, and shoes made of bits of oilcloth. I promise never, never to dress so again, especially at home. I promise to take a complete wardrobe and a clothes-wringer when next I go to Ipose. But really, I was thought to be rather presentable there, and was not without honor. I spoke in the morning and evening to more people than I have yet spoken to — I’m sorry, but I have n’t an idea as to how many, for I am always too much interested in what I am doing to count. But I had the nice cozy feeling which comes with a full house.
In the evening, after I have eaten, the women and children crowd into my hut and we talk, but not necessarily on serious subjects. I think that I shall manage to get out there every two or three weeks after things get under way.
August 10.
I did not tell you about the drinking at Ipose because I thought it would worry you. It was so much simpler than it sounds. I was sleeping there one night and had got to bed when I realized that the men in the palaver house were noisy — we have drinking enough in our forest for me to recognize the note. I got up, lit my lantern, and went to the palaver house. I agree that I was afraid. By the light of the fire they were laughing and chatting — perhaps ten of them. And sure enough they were drinking. They looked at me in their customary friendly way; no one was tipsy. I told them that it was taboo for the white woman to sleep in a town where the men were drinking; and that the white men would certainly have opposed my visit to Ipose had they supposed that the men of Ipose would drink while I was their guest, and that I must move on if they did not stop.
They said, why, so they were drinking; Mabiama had just returned from a journey and they were recounting adventures, but because of my word they would stop. And they stopped. It was as simple as that. I went back to my hut; and I could hear the talk thin out and die away as the men parted or fell asleep. Soon only the sheep stirred in the town of Ipose.
September 20.
Here is news for you and me and light upon the future. Mrs. Lehman and I, walking along the Mfaka, the government road, at dusk, met a woman with whom we stopped to talk. She had a huge fresh flourish of tattoo between her shoulder-blades, and Mrs. Lehman asked her why she submitted her body to such pain. ‘Because,’ said the woman, ‘these marks will buy me food after death.’
Mrs. Lehman expounded the future to the confounding of such commerce. The woman listened with growing wonder, until her emotions went beyond her discretion and she flung her arms about me, laughing. The African, you must know, is very social, and wants a friend against whom to lean in every moment of interest. We were very deeply interested. We had never heard this use of tattooing so much as whispered; but when we came to ask, all the boys, laughing and shamefaced, said it is commonly believed.
September 21.
It is pleased entirely father would have been these nights if he could have seen his daughter sitting in her room with her friends as close as herrings all over the floor — big lads and little ones, and women and girls, all come in
For to admire, for to see, for to behold this world so wide
that I let them into. Never a newcomer but said, ‘I want to see your father,’ when I always owned up to him on the wall, and to mother too. Expressions of admiration and astonishment were unfailingly offered before the shrines; after which and other introductory matter we would get down to business, which was of no less a matter than the accounting for and the justifying of all given conditions under heaven and beyond. No one who was not on the spot and in the heart of it can guess how busy and excited people are who engage in creating a universe. For myself, I have come to the end of a most vivid experience. I seem to have been so necessary to the process and so popular, and so successful, that I am really embarrassed in speaking of it, lest I loom too large.
The boys went home this noon for ten days, and it can hardly ever be the same again. I think back to its beginning, a small matter of a question or two, of an evening, and then suddenly, the Bible to be explained and the solar system,— but most urgently, man to be explained! I was pretty weak on the solar system, I must say; but I made a fair showing on the Bible, and when it came to man I shone, and every one shone, and there was a perfect conflagration. We had about four nights of such joyous deliberations, and to-night I feel rather lonely.
The boys felt so happy to go home that I felt cravings on my own account, and wished that I might make up a little bundle of some odd things in a plantain leaf, and walk all day and all night till I saw the fires of home winking through the cracks of the hut on 78th Street. Then I would cry out, ‘Me soya!’ and mother would rise up and cook for me — something special of course, no matter what the time of night.
September 30.
I never have any time now except in the afternoon, when my energies run rather low from the exertions of the morning. In the evenings my room will be full of people — women and the school-boys — who come to talk with me or to sit quietly in the pleasant lighted room. I sit and sew in my steamer chair, and all the time, my dears, there is the effort to pass the barriers of kind. We were talking so last night — about the common uses of life — when a certain young fellow who had been listening with a sad attention, leaned his head on his hand with a kind of sad weariness and said directly to me, across the heads of the others and the current of our talk, — across my effort and his effort, — ‘How we differ!' I cannot tell you how much there was of balked endeavor and of relinquishment in his eyes; because, you see, — and he saw better than you can, — the difference is so much to his disadvantage.
But such a look is a challenge. How can you understand the necessity of rousing the courage of self in such as these? Though maybe you do, my dears, — you seem to understand so much. I think you must understand why I am willing to give up my evenings to whoever comes. One comes to have such different methods and such different hopes as one comes to know— and such different illusions too, I suppose. Thank goodness the time has passed when — after a passionate appeal to a higher nature, as conceived by the appellant — the sordid answer broke the heart. I declare that I can pass from the subject of integrity to the subject of salt fish without any sense of eloquence gone to waste. And one comes to have trust in time, an optimistic attitude toward its processes. There is no little boy or big blunderer so unpromising but I can call up Time and turn over the case. ‘Take care of him for a year.’ There is a certain expression, common and very moving, a veil of softening over the passions of an African face, and that is the habit of self-control and of subjection to the spirit of God. There is not a member of the church but has this expression — which is quite a mystical blending of suffering and joy; and I never see the shade of it settle on a boy’s face but I have to care for him.
LOLODORF, October 3.
Do you remember when Ze and Malinga had their little son, Simon? A year ago last February, and they were so happy. Last week the little boy died from eating poison mushrooms. This morning the word came from Elat, where Ze is studying for the ministry; and there was poor old Bunga, Ze’s mother, who must know. Bunga loved the little boy so much, with that human passion of the old for the young of their blood. When I went into her hut this morning she lay with her face in the dust of the ground. Presently she looked at me and raised herself ever so little. She shook her head, with her eyes on mine. It may sound simple, that she shook her head, but it was too much for me. She put her face in the dust again, and I cried. After a while she rose and brought a toy wringer which Mrs. Lehman had given Simon. This she contemplated with a kind of wonder, turning the silly little crank of it, and wiping the dust from it. Suddenly, out of this dry silence, she burst into the heart-racking wail of this country, and fell to gesturing with movements terribly tense and singularly angular, angular like the movements on an Egyptian inscription, and tense with tragic human protest. All the life of that little child was rehearsed in this new light of terror and pity: its birth, and its little career. People came and went in the hut, conjured up by the passion of that old woman. I saw myself stoop in at the door and heard myself say, ‘It is a fine child.’ And many other scenes I saw, until the past crowded in and filled the hut. Then it was gone; she dismissed it; all that play of gesture was put aside, and the old woman drooped on the ground.
Now she began to call ever so softly to her little grandson and to peer out of the door. Presently she was wiping the dust from the toy. On the wall there was a picture of Christ, out of a Sunday-school chart. Poor old Bunga got up and went to it, not like a grown woman, but like a child. With her fingers she touched the face of it, followed the lines of it, and turning to me she said, in a whisper, ‘It is the Lord.’ And she wept.
When I went back in the afternoon she was sitting quietly in the ashes. She said that she felt very ill, poor old woman, but she was calmer and more susceptible to the comfort of human contact. Her neighbors are making it pretty hard for her, especially since
Benzhuli’s child died. It is quite clear that the children of Christians are doomed. But the old woman knows whom she has believed, and God looks after his own. Poor old woman!
October 10.
After supper I go to the quarters where the wives of the workmen sit at leisure in the short dusk. It will be dark when I get back to my room and the people begin to drift in. I never really want them to come; before they come I am always hoping that they won’t come to-night; but by eight o’clock it is so interesting that I am glad; and when I go to bed I lie and wonder at the strange unformed world of which I have had glimpses. Little by little their fear of ridicule is slipping from them, and I come nearer and nearer to the place where they live. The African is exceedingly secret; his thoughts move under cover. There is an obscure sense of mental excitement in any vital intercourse with a people so secret. There is besides a mental excitement in ministering to such a passion for knowledge. I cannot hope to give you any complete sense of how they inarticulately clamor about me of an evening. Their very silences, when they wait with shining eyes, are clamorous. I realize this, of course: that I both pipe and pay the piper. I pay a certain steep price for their — well, their diversion, if diversion it can be called which is at once so intense and so utilitarian. I pay the price of never — under the most harassing of circumstances — turning a deaf ear. This is a price. I also never laugh, but that is a trick, and no trick at all. If I did laugh who would laugh with me? So it is easy not to laugh, but to lend the glad ear, when the grasshopper is a burden!
I enlarge so much upon this period of my life (as Santa Teresa says) because it offers certain very interesting aspects and I can’t seem to present them; I can’t feel that I am making you feel them. Probably you must wonder sometimes, as I do often enough (but never with any sense of personal stake), as to the future of the African peoples. I don’t know, my dears. I have not an idea. They wonder themselves; they have misgivings that haunt and shake them. They beg me to explain their low estate on any other ground, if I can, than their intrinsic inferiority. They see as clearly as you do that the normal man does not sleep away the thousand years, or all the ages. At least some of them see this and are weighed upon by heavy racial misgivings. Their ignorance is hateful to them; they suffer. They ask questions sometimes with all the air of confessing sins. I am speaking of the men, the young lads. The women are not so mentally conscious; they proclaim their stupidity, but attribute it to their sex. They are very much less mentally active. The men and boys acquire very quickly the rudiments of such knowledge as we offer; they develop really wonderfully; their present is full of promise, but the shadow on their past lies over all their days.
I can’t work it out. But this is perfectly evident: God does indeed accept them and befriend them. They seem capable of deep spiritual experience that is like a flame to refine them. You must take my word for this, who will never see the strange and subtle change that I see.
(To be continued.)